Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [88]
Johannes revisited his few acquaintances, once more prowled the docks and byways of the old city, at night watched the lighted boats bobbing on the Alster. What really kept him in Hamburg that autumn, though, was not the town or its people but waiting for Clara. In early November she arrived for three concerts with the Philharmonic. Johannes went out to meet her at Harburg and proudly escorted her through the city gates.
Clara was charmed by the Brahms family—Johann Jakob the affable peasant, Christiane now a toothless crone of sixty-five, but boundlessly kind: “His mother is splendid! She gives what she has, with agreeable simplicity, without fuss and talk, and that endears her to me.” Clara formed an enduring bond of sympathy with Elise Brahms, and Johannes’s housebound sister was dazzled by the attentions of the famous artist.
The public received Clara’s concerts with the Philharmonic coolly, but that did not surprise her or sully the visit. She slept in a hotel and took meals with the Brahmses. Johannes’s friend Julius Otto Grimm, visiting for Clara’s concerts, stayed in the family flat. For his friends Johannes played the eager host, showing off his parents and his hometown, his desk and ranks of toy soldiers. They toured the harbor, walked between the lindens of the Jungfernstieg to the Pavilion where his father played. (Did he show them the Animierlokale where he used to sit all night at the piano?) Observing the simple home and simple people of Johannes’s family, Clara wondered in her journal “how it was possible for Johannes to develop into what he is, amidst such surroundings.” Where had mad, dashing Young Kreisler come from?
She was puzzled to find that for all Johannes’s reverence for his mother, he seemed to dote even more on Johann Jakob, to take pride even in his father’s clownishness. For a long time he had brought people to the house to meet his father and listen to his yarns, told in priceless Plattdeutsch. A friend recalled that once when Johannes got paid by a publisher he lined up gold coins along the piano like soldiers and crowed, “This is for my beloved father in Hamburg!”10
Brahms’s feelings toward his father may also have formed out of democratic sentiment on one hand, boastfulness on the other. He did not look down on his father but enjoyed what Johann Jakob amounted to—a peasant raconteur, a Bierfiedler. At the same time, maybe there was the opposite implication: This buffoon did not make me what I am, I did it myself. And it is I, who am incomprehensible to my family, who will redeem my family’s name.
THE VISIT TO HAMBURG gave Clara more understanding of Johannes, and a greater tenderness. “Often I thank God for this friend,” she wrote, “who has been sent to me in this time of bitterest trial, like a veritable angel of comfort.” She added about Christiane, “I could not help wondering how long this good woman still has to live. Perhaps someday it will fall to me to take her place as mother to him.” Clara and Johannes were trying on roles. Mother? Sister? For now the fantasy of substitute mother was the only one Clara allowed herself.11
On November 20, she left for her next engagements—twelve concerts in five weeks, ending in Berlin with a series in conjunction with Joachim.12 After she left Hamburg, Julius Grimm wrote Joachim from Hamburg, “Our blond friend is blissful and droll.”13 Clara had agreed to Johannes’s plea that in her letters she use the familiar du, “thou.” To accept this usage is a charged event between friends, more so between a man and woman—a talisman of intimacy. Rapturous at seeing the word in her handwriting, Brahms acceded to Clara’s demand that he continue to address her with the formal and respectful Sie. Before long, though, Johannes could hardly bear to apply the formal second person to Clara; du crept more and more into